Building Healthy Body Esteem in a Body Toxic World.
Tools for preventing body image, eating, fitness and weight problems before they start. BodyImageHealth.org confronts two of today’s greatest health and wellness concerns—the drive to be thin and the rising rate of fatness—providing a proven, surprisingly simple, but resoundingly effective new approach to help adults and children avoid body image and weight problems.
NEW, fully updated curriculum!
Healthy Body Image: Teaching Kids to Eat and Love Their Bodies Too! by Kathy Kater
—the most widely used curriculum for promoting healthy body image, eating, fitness and weight in children.
—a 2005 publication of the National Eating Disorder Organization For more information or to purchase single or quantity copies of the curriculum
At a time when they should feel secure about their body's growth, too many children today learn to worry about their weight. The compelling wish to be thin or lean provides the seeds for a host of body image, eating, fitness and weight problems that are extremely difficult to reverse once established. It is now statistically "normal" for females in America today to be dissatisfied with their bodies and describe themselves as "fat" regardless of actual size. This detrimental situation affects ever younger girls and a growing number of boys who feel pressured by the lean and sculpted "ideal" male physique. Teacher's don't know what to do when even kindergarten children ask "am I fat?" To make matters worse, most children and adults learn to respond to weight concerns in ways that contribute to the very problems they hope to avoid. As the drive to be thin, "weight control" and dieting for weight loss have consumed our population, the rate of fatness has more than doubled. Clearly weight loss or even weight control as a goal has failed. It's critical to understand the complex factors at play to avoid making matters worse. Most "solutions" persist in the belief that if people feel bad or afraid enough about their weight they will "do something" about it. But this disregards the facts: body dissatisfaction does not motivate healthy behaviors. To the contrary, unhappiness about weight leads to unhealthy and disordered eating, weight gain, and poorer overall heatlh. It turns out that worry about weight is a self-fulfilling prophesy: the thinner we try to be, the fatter we become. If the goal is "weight control," you can't get there from here.
Parents, educators, medical professionals, legislators and others who care about health want to help. But with the risk of eating disorders on the one hand and the rising rate of fatness on the other, how to help without harming has never been more crucial. If fat phobia and efforts to "manage weight" are part of the problem, what is an effective solution? While much remains to be learned, enough is now known about the toxic messages that promote most body image, eating, fitness, and weight concerns to prevent problems before they start. BodyImageHealth offers a proven guide through the Model for Healthy Body Image. This model provides a comprehensive, big picture approach to teach young and old to value health and resist pressures that promote negative body esteem and counterproductive lifestyle habits. The Model for Healthy Body Image is the basis for the Healthy Body Image curriculum, but may be used for any health promotion initiative.
